I’ve been thinking a lot about time as it relates to personal or artistic growth a lot lately. Whether it’s reading Facebook posts by artists friends talking about juggling family and work life with their studio time, or my own late night baby feedings while posting reviews for shows and adding content to this website, artists and those who work in the arts are often juggling many different projects and passions. And many of us artists/art workers have to juggle a full time job as well as our artistic endeavors, cutting into the time that can be spent honing our craft and finding our voice.

I’ve also been thinking about an idea that was made popular by the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In full disclosure, I haven’t read the book, but I’ve looked into one of the most famous (or infamous) theories in the book, the 10,000 Hour Rule. This rule, or thought experiment, says that greatness requires a lot of time. We don’t just wish for something, work really hard at it for a few days or weeks, and voila! It happens.

On the contrary, this 10,000 Hour Rule states that those who have been the most successful, the most groundbreaking, the most iconoclastic have spent an enormous amount of time honing their skills and working towards this level. Gladwell states that by practicing a specific task, by working on your craft, for twenty hours a week, within 10 years you will have reached the pinnacle of success in your field. Now, it goes without saying that not everyone who just practices something for ten years is going to be a Pablo Picasso or the Beatles, that is not the point at all.

What Gladwell is saying is that by being driven, by creating a goal, finding the tasks and skills that you need to learn to achieve that goal, and by honing and practicing those skills over and over again, you will create in yourself a highly successful and hardened veteran. By putting in the time and effort, this experience that you learn while working toward your goals will make you more able to succeed in achieving them.

The forty-something me sometimes falls into the trap of thinking that the skills and experience that I have gained over time had always been with me. And it often takes me a moment to remind myself that when I was in my twenties or thirties, I just didn’t know the skills or have the chops to do what I’m doing now. These skills and experiences build upon themselves to bring us to our here and now.

So what’s the point of this editorial, you may ask? The heart of it is this: working on anything with an intention of being successful and enduring takes time. It takes a lot of time. But it doesn’t have to be large blocks of your time, it can also take little bites of your time. All of those small hours of work add toward your 10,000. How do you parse out your time? How do you arrange your schedule? How much time to you create for skills building, for studio time, for working to make the arts scene in this Valley strong and vibrant? It doesn’t have to be your 9 to 5, but in the few magical hours between midnight and 2 a.m. a lot can get done. Even between baby feedings and diaper changes.